Mobile at home

ACTA/ACAL International Conference
Perth, Australia
7-11 April, 2016

Normally when I present at a conference, there is some combination of planes, trains, busses and taxis involved in getting there. So it’s a rare pleasure to be able to walk to a conference venue from my apartment, as was the case when I presented a keynote session, Yet another literacy? Mobile devices, mobile learning, and mobile literacy, at the well-attended ACTA/ACAL Conference in my hometown of Perth.

The theme of the conference was Diversity: Exchanging Ways of Being. Mobile devices are of course a technology that is opening up increasing diversity in educational approaches, content, and settings. In my keynote, I argued that, in order to help our students gain the most from learning experiences with mobile devices, and at the same time to prepare them for their future lives in a mobile, digitally mediated world, we need to support the development of their mobile literacy. In one way, it’s a newly emerging literacy. But in another way, as a macroliteracy composed of existing literacies – like information literacy, multimodal literacy, network literacy, and code literacy – it is not as new as it seems. It is, however, crucial to ensure that there is a level of critical awareness embedded in students’ mobile literacy, so that they learn to ask critical questions about about our mobile devices and their political, economic, social, health and environmental implications.

One of the disadvantages of attending a conference in your hometown is that, unfortunately, other commitments and obligations continue, so I was only able to participate in the conference for a couple of hours. That was enough, though, to have some interesting conversations with delegates, who were clearly inspired by the whole conference. It was great to see such a successful event taking place in Australia’s most isolated capital city.

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